LEGO Horizon Adventures review – brick and treat

Sony Interactive Entertainment is in an interesting position. With its usual triple-A blockbusters taking too much time and costing so much money, it’s hard to keep up with the demand from fans of its first-party franchises. You can’t make a new Horizon or God of War game within a couple of years, so what do you do? The answer, Sony has figured, is to work with a partner and diversify your franchises to reach a new audience. Following the smashing success of Astro Bot, LEGO Horizon Adventures looks like the next step for Sony in getting out of its costly comfort zone.

The game retells the story of Horizon Zero Dawn in a family-friendly, LEGOfied manner. Like most LEGO games, Horizon Adventures has you building structures with LEGO blocks while having a smile on your face the entire time. It takes the serious world of Horizon and turns it on its head with self-aware writing and simple gameplay mechanics.

In this roughly six-hour adventure, you’ll relive Horizon Zero Dawn with minor narrative changes. They don’t distract or destroy the core Horizon canon, because the game fully embraces itself being a variant of the original game. However, it never draws attention to the fact that it’s a spinoff. You could hand the game to a seven-year-old, and they won’t be confused about the story or the characters’ origins.

The LEGO spinoff forgoes the open world of the original for a linear, level-based layout, and it works. Divided into different chapters, most of the game sees Aloy and her friends searching for various artifacts through different biomes. Along the way, you’ll be encouraged to dress up the home base at Mother’s Heart and unlock many outfits for our heroes.

Combat in Horizon Adventures follows the same strategy as the original game. You have a bow and different arrows with elemental power-ups, and you take down the robot dinosaurs, and some humans, by chipping away their weak points. There are also plenty of throwables and elemental damage zones in the levels you can use to your advantage, along with different throwable gadgets.

If you choose to play as the other characters – Varl, Teersa, and Erend – you get access to different types of weapons. Varl can throw his spear, while Erend uses a heavy hammer. What hero you choose will dramatically change the way you approach bosses, and they too can equip special variations of their weapons, obtained from a merchant that appears regularly between levels.

Almost every level ends with a boss battle, with different types of bosses introduced throughout the story. They don’t present anything new if you’ve played Zero Dawn, though the pace at which they’re introduced keeps things refreshing.

I wouldn’t call it a very challenging game, but having to restart entire combat scenarios because you got staggered by projectiles while darting around in hopes of finding a health tree can get frustrating.

Each level also includes special treasure chests and Tallnecks to climb, and later in the story, you get to choose between going down branching paths. There are no alterations to the story itself, with players getting the option to explore or move to the next plot point. Following the conclusion of specific chapters, there are also optional predator hunts – side activities that explore the world deeper.

When you’re playing a LEGO game, there’s one cardinal rule you have to follow: break everything. Not only is it satisfying, but it also rewards you with LEGO studs, which are the game’s only form of currency. Nearly every action in the game rewards you with them, and you can also take quick detours off the beaten track to locate treasure chests. The amount of studs you get from these is usually paltry, so there’s no obligation to seek them out. However, they can be useful as they also sometimes offer a special weapon or throwable.

I’ve never seen Aloy so happy or upbeat in the seven years that Aloy has existed in media. Ashly Burch channels her Tiny Tina energy to build a fun version of Aloy, and it’s a welcome sight. “Ready to meat your end?” she says as she builds a hot dog stand that throws bombs at robots. The rest of the cast is also at the top of their game, fully amping up the joy and playfulness in recurring gags and one-liners. A special mention goes to JB Blanc as Rost, who also provides comedic narration throughout the game.

Many LEGO games support co-op play, and it’s the same with Horizon Adventures. You can partner with a friend online or hand a second controller to someone on the couch beside you. Given that the game has four playable heroes, there is no friction between the single-player mode and the co-op.

Playing in co-op is not just fun, but it also makes handling enemies easier. While you can adjust the difficulty slider at any time, and even enable an invincibility mode, the game throws so many enemies at you that keeping track can be tough.

I wish we could switch protagonists at any time in the game, not just at the start of a level. You can’t replay story missions, so trying to see how a different hero would tackle a situation requires a replay.

The customization options are also entirely cosmetic, existing purely to sell you on the idea of new LEGO sets to collect in the real world, even if they don’t exist yet. You earn enough studs through the main story to unlock most items, and setting different sections of the home base to specific LEGO themes is cool. 

I played the game on a standard PS5 with two graphical options: Fidelity mode and Performance Mode. Both look nice on a 4K display, though an increase in the level of detail in the fidelity mode is tough to spot. While the game is playable at 30fps, I chose to play the majority of my playthrough at 60fps and never noticed any frame drops.

LEGO Horizon Adventures is a cute game that successfully translates most of the franchise’s characters and mechanics into the joyful world of LEGO.

Score: 7/10

Platform tested: PS5

LEGO Horizon Adventures releases on November 14, 2024, for PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch.